As historians, you all know this, but it's worth stating
anyway: we are shaped by our contexts – theological, geographical, class, race,
family, gender, national, etc.Sometimes
we begin to really see the water in which we swim by stepping into another
stream.Other times, reading about our
stream's origins, its headwaters, can help us see our stream more clearly. I study American history, my research is
primarily in the twentieth century, and I don't read outside my field nearly
enough.But this summer I had the
opportunity to do so with a group of Wheaton College colleagues when we read Willie Jennings'sThe Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.Jennings, a theologian, has written a
historical piece that explores the interconnections between western
Christianity, racial hierarchies, capitalism, commodification of bodies and
places, and pedagogy.Those who study
religion in American history and have been shaped by – and shape – the academy will
benefit from the book (although, if you're an Americanist, the only character
that may be familiar is Olaudah Equiano).

Jennings shows how the racial hierarchies westerners
imagined in the 15th century as they interacted with people living
in South America and Africa, hierarchies that were inseparable from a
theological pedagogy that assumed a one-way transfer of knowledge from the
educated to the ignorant, deformed what he called "the Christian
imagination."For Jennings,
"Christian imagination" refers to the possibilities of what could
constitute Christianity.These racial
and pedagogical hierarchies developed in the context of mercantile capitalism,
and the combination commodified bodies and land in new and detrimental
ways.

As a theologian, Jennings argues that this complicated
history has mangled the Christian imagination, leading Christians to imagine
that God's call on their lives is to relate primarily to Him, not to one
another, and so has limited the possibilities of Christians from different
backgrounds joining together in intimacy, being with one another in what he
calls "spaces of communion."Jennings
reads Olaudah Equiano, for instance, as longing for communion with the white captors and freemen who
were his brothers in Christ, as well as his mostly white readers.Equiano, who controlled the presentation of
his book, included an image of himself looking out at the reader on the cover
of his The Interesting Narrative of the
Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), which contrasted the stylistic standards of
the book's genre, but invited people into relationship.Nonetheless, when he failed to find intimacy
with his fellow Christians, Equiano sustained himself by telling himself that
God was all he really needed.For
Jennings the theologian, this theological narrative (common in western Christianity)
is wrong.

Jennings grounds his arguments in particular places, with
particular people, and pays careful attention to how western Christians
commodified places, and thus were able to ignore the details of those places,
imagining themselves as transcending place.I have written about place before.I learned the importance of where one lives when I moved to Chicago's
Austin neighborhood, which was radically different from the wealthy suburb in
which I grew up.In Austin my husband
and I attended Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church, a neighborhood
interracial church, and attended closely to what it meant to live in as white
people in a black neighborhood with many people living at or below the poverty
line.We were pleased when families
moved into vacant houses, we paid attention to who was standing on the corner,
and we knew the impact of a homeowner dying, potentially leaving a house
vacant.Perhaps because living in Austin
was such a cross-cultural experience, we became immersed in the place, aware of
how different it was from our home towns every time we came back into our
neighborhood.We bought a house, and, in
my own mind, my identity became intricately tied up in the place we were
putting down roots.When I saw other
white people in the neighborhood (besides those I knew), I wondered what they
were doing there because they didn't belong.Perhaps they were up to no good.I
walked the neighborhood daily, either with a neighbor to exercise or going to
the bus or the train.When people asked
me in casual conversation why I was there, I responded that we went to church
in the neighborhood, we owned a house.We
belonged.

Chicagoland's racial geographies play a prominent role in my
own scholarship, and I know – and want to teach others – that the segregation I
experienced growing up and in the Austin neighborhood was created.It did not just happen.Its consequences, for wealthy and poor people, Latino, Native American, white, black (and every other racial/ethnic group) are significant.As Soong-Chan Rah (another theologian) argues in TheNext Evangelicalism, segregated Christianity leads segregated groups to be
held in cultural captivity.Rah explores
white evangelicalism in particular, arguing that we – my tradition, my people –
are held captive to the broader American culture's history and practice of racism,
individualism, and consumerism and materialism.

For Jennings, Christians must identify as Gentiles, as
people grafted into Israel, outsiders adopting a new way of life, submitting
themselves to that life.When we were at
Rock Church in the Austin neighborhood, we were part of one of those rare spaces
of communion, spaces where people from different backgrounds loved and valued
one another as they lived together.There, my academic work
mattered, but was not the only source of knowledge and wisdom.There I flourished as I submitted to those
different from me.

After Wheaton College hired me, my husband and I moved to
Wheaton.I was pregnant and we left not
because we wanted to raise our child in the suburbs, but because I am a working
mom, and if we lived close to where I worked, we could integrate our lives our
lives more easily with work and neighborhood.People sometimes think we left because we thought it was dangerous in
Austin.I think it might be more
dangerous in Wheaton.Here, delightful,
loving people can easily, and sometimes unintentionally, require those
different from its powerful inhabitants to conform.There are fewer spaces of communion.Here, what might appear to be flourishing may
too often ignore the history of American places, which is a history of race.

In
our conversation with Willie Jennings, he called our college to account for its
place, to not hover above Wheaton, Chicagoland, and the Midwest, but to be in
it.Why
does accounting for place matter?It's
first of all good for our souls.I am
reading a new book, Wendell Berry andHigher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place by Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro
(University of Kentucky Press, 2017) that exegetes Wendell Berry's work for
colleges and universities (secular and religious alike), arguing that institutions of higher education ought to form students'
"imaginations and affections . . . so that rather than desiring upward
mobility, they can imagine healthy, placed lives," because
"contentment is a virtue that is particularly difficult for those of us in
higher education to practice; universities exist to prepare students to lead
better lives in better places, and this obsession with something better erodes
our ability to be content" (1).Universities' and colleges' accounting for place also can help reckon with - and perhaps right - the racial histories of their particular places. Perhaps I am at Wheaton in part to help my students, my
colleagues, myself, other evangelicals, to reckon with our racial past, and the
ways it can be mapped on to places and spaces.In doing so, we might be able to live better in this place that is Wheaton.After all, as the black author James Baldwin
wrote in 1963, "to accept one's past – one's history – is not the same
thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it."*